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Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have agreed to settle their outstanding litigation, and Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion as a result, the two companies said Thursday.

The settlement ends all litigation between the two companies, including a Delaware case and two cases in Japan. The U.S. case was scheduled to go to trial in 2010.

"While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development," the two companies said in a statement.

AMD executives had declined to comment at an AMD analyst day on Thursday about the possibility of a settlement.

Under the terms of the agreement, AMD and Intel obtain patent rights from a new 5-year cross license agreement, Intel and AMD will give up any claims of breach from the previous license agreement, and Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion. Intel has also agreed to abide by a set of business practice provisions, the companies said.

As a very happy owner of a 4850 from the last gen I am obviously very interested in the 5850. Looking at the specs the 5850 look to be even closer to the 5870 then the 4850 was to the 4870. So anyone looking for a midrange part to kick some serious arse this is the ticket.

With AMD making gains in the discrete graphics card market rising to around 40% in third-quarter 2008 according to a recent report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) Nvidia is planning to cut its graphics card prices in an attempt to curb further loss of market share, according to sources at graphics card makers.

AMD anticipates taking 50% of the market after reducing prices for its ATI Radeon HD 4000 series products, but to counter Nvidia has also made moves to cut prices for its GeForce GTX 200, 9800 GT and 9600 GT series.

AMD today announced the availability of three new AMD Phenom X3 triple-core processors that, when combined with the AMD 780 series chipset, can give consumers a full HD experience and visually stunning gaming and digital performance. As the worlds only triple-core x86 processor, AMD Phenom X3 processors bring multi-core technology to a broader audience in search of desktop processors that easily handle todays multi-threaded digital entertainment workloads.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. projected a sharp drop in first-quarter revenue and announced a 10% reduction in its work force, as technical gaffes and softening computer demand afflicted the chip maker.

The job cuts will affect about 1,680 workers at the Sunnyvale, Calif., company, which previously employed 16,800, an AMD spokesman said.

AMD, locked in a battle with Intel Corp. over chips known as microprocessors, said it expects first-quarter revenue of $1.5 billion, about 15% lower than the company reported in the fourth period. The company previously had predicted a decline in line with normal seasonal patterns. The AMD spokesman said a decline of about 7% is typical for the period.

Advanced Micro Devices today said it has started shipping triple-core Phenom processors, bringing desktops with the chip closer to release.

The triple-core processors are shipping in volume to PC makers only right now, AMD officials said. It declined further comment on chip availability and specifications.

Many major vendors, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard, have hinted at including the Phenom triple-core processors in desktops.

Dell has listed plans to use the chip in its OptiPlex 740 business desktop systems, with 1.5M bytes of L2 cache and 2M bytes of shared L3 cache, in an online brochure. Dell will ship the triple-core OptiPlex in the second quarter, a company spokeswoman said, declining further comment.

The Games for Windows program which Microsoft have been marketing for a while attempted to unify or at least strive for certain levels of consistency between titles. Microsoft have now partnered with a collection of hardware manufacturers, developers and publishers in order to bring to life the PC Gaming Alliance.

Doug Friedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, said that graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. could well acquire x86 microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices in order to re-architect it. The acquisition is considered to be useful due to the fact that roadmaps of AMD and Intel Corp. threat Nvidia. The only problem for the graphics giant is that AMDs x86 license is a non-transferable one.

We believe AMD [could] face mounting pressure from shareholders, to restructure the company with a focus on a change in leadership, said the analyst.

With the release of the Phenom Processor AMD has introduced the first native quad core consumer level processor. Unfortunately as has been shown in reviews around the net the Phenom is still not the performance king despite being one of the newest processors released to the market. Thus AMD follows true to tradition and has released an unlocked or "Black Edition" of their processor. AMD intends these Black Edition processors to invigorate interest in AMD products by catering toward the enthusiast desires to overclock.

Move over Microsoft and Yahoo, time to speculate on the unholy marriage of two other Titans: NVIDIA and AMD. AMD hasn't been doing so hot lately and while NVIDIA doesn't have the cash to straight-up buy AMD, it could do so with additional financing. This would mean NVIDIA would consume its only rival, ATi in the process. Of course NVIDIA has expressed no such desire to acquire AMD, and AMD isn't looking to be acquired, but you can't like Microsoft have all the fun. Next up: Google seeks to acquire... I don't know... Apple, yeah, let's go with that, Google's going to be buy Apple.

AMD's new naming scheme will start with a letter to indicate the product level; G represents premium product, B represents intermediate product and L represents value product. A second letter will indicate the product's power consumption, with P representing over 65W, S around 65W and E less than 65W, noted Sobon.